The Wrap: Feds Double Up AI Use Cases; Agency AI Runs the Gamut; Santa Joe Delivers Day Off

Welcome to The Wrap for Thursday, December 19!

From the newsroom at MeriTalk, it’s the quickest read in Federal tech news. Here’s what you need to know today:

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Feds Double Up AI Use Cases

Federal agencies are working on at least 1,700 use cases for artificial intelligence tech in 2024 – more than double the 757 AI tool use cases?reported?in 2023. That was the headline news from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) when it?unveiled?its consolidated 2024 Federal AI use case inventory this week. Key categories: the top three types of AI use cases in the new inventory are: mission-enabling; health and medical; and government services. A total of 37 agencies reported their AI uses cases for 2024, and among those, the departments of Health and Human Services and Veterans Affairs are the top dogs with more than 200 use cases each. What’s not in the total that could push the use case number much higher?? Excluded categories include research and development use cases; national security systems; intelligence community systems; and Pentagon use cases.

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What Are AI Cases Covering?

The short answer to that question is an awful lot. Speaking at the ATARC 2024 Public Sector Summit on Dec. 19, Frank Indiviglio, chief technology officer at NOAA, said his agency has been working its AI use cases for a wide range of scientific inquiries – from “the surface of the sun to the bottom of the ocean.” He continued, “AI has a potential of really allowing greater resolution, higher high-resolution models, which gives you better data, which gives everybody a better forecast, but there are really kind of interesting use cases within that sphere,” to improve environmental monitoring and management.?Speaking at the same event, Dawn Zimmer, the Energy Department’s recently appointed principal deputy CIO, said the gamut at her agency runs from helping the Coast Guard with evacuation efforts to assessing “various ways AI and machine learning could enhance an adversary’s understanding of nuclear threat devices.” Please do click through for more on the individual use cases.

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Santa Joe Delivers Day Off

President Biden put on his Santa cap today and delivered most Federal workers an early holiday present in the form of a day off on Dec. 24 – the day before Christmas that is celebrated by many. The Federal government is already closed for Dec. 25. The day off for Feds came in an?executive order?from the White House today. If your boss is a grinch – or you work for an agency that never sleeps on national security and defense – the extra day off may not apply.? An extra day off for Feds around the holidays is far from unprecedented, but certainly not guaranteed. In recent years Presidents Trump, Obama, and George W. Bush decreed days off for Federal employees on either the day preceding or following Christmas Day.

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OMB Claims $100 Billion Savings

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said today that the Biden-Harris administration has delivered over $100 billion in savings and cost avoidance through the work of category management – an enterprise-wide approach to Federal contracting that makes the government a more organized, better-informed buyer. According to OMB, a lot of that payoff is coming from the administration’s launch of?the Better Contracting Initiative, which looks to ensure the Federal government is getting better deals when purchasing goods and services. OMB Deputy Director Jason Miller wrote in a Dec. 19 blog post that the initiative “strengthens the government’s buying practices to ensure that tens of thousands of contracting officials get better deals on goods and services to deliver on agency missions.” While agencies have been using this strategy for several years, OMB said the Biden-Harris administration has taken category management to “new heights” by achieving roughly $60 billion in cost avoidance in the last four years – a feat the agency said is an “historic acceleration in savings and efficiency.”

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Once again, let’s “call IT a day,” but we'll bring you more tomorrow. Until then please check the MeriTalk breaking news website throughout the day for the latest on government IT people, process, and policy. And finally, please hit the news tip jar [with leads, breaking news, or simply your two cents] at [email protected].